SL & Postmodernism
I have been chewing on ideas of how to make my dissertation a meaningful one and a practical one. Since I’m not at the beginning of my career life, yet somewhat at the beginning of a new career, I’m not in the position to do a dissertation only relevant to a tenure-track position. I thoroughly enjoy the job I have at pict.sdsu.edu, working with faculty, administrators, policy and research. I’m very good at getting things done.
It’s been my unrelenting interest in postmodernism that gets my attention in the midst of getting things done. In one sense it’s about the pursuit of questioning the pursuit of a truth. In another it’s about deeper understanding of what’s going on in our world. I’m throughly convinced that technologies, like web 2.0, 3.0 in particular, are the tools of postmodernism; they go hand in hand. I think critical and social theorist’s, feminists, constructivists, educational psychologists, to name a few fields, have laid important theoretical groundwork over the course of the 20th century. Cumulatively, it has created postmodern thinking and lived experience.
Second Life is a notable example. So what is postmodernism really? It’s got such a bad rap. Here’s one way to look at it, through the lens of discourse. T
Postmodernism contends that the situatedness of human thought renders impossible notions of neutral, objective reason or an autonomous self-regulating self. Knowledge, knowing and its discourse(s) constitute one another. Our experience of a self and necessarily “the other,” are far from being empirical, knowable or perceived objects; they are rather subjects of the discourse(s) in which they find and position themselves. This subjectivity continuously adjusts and repositions itself in terms of gender, class, race and social milieu. It always interacts with and reacts to changing discourse(s) (Foucault, 1972, 1980; Griffiths, April, 1995).
The idea of discourse is rather abstract for the average person and has different meanings depending on who’s using the term. Social and critical theorists, philosophers interested in the social world understand discourses to mean ideas that become words, ways of thinking that become behaving, which then become lived experiences of individuals then groups within a society. I’m still getting accustomed to the various discourses I’ve encountered in SL. It’s a complete “world” with a variety of lived experiences. I’m comparing it to first life only to ground it in something we all already know about.
Anyway, an example of a discourse would be women in the US. The way we think, feel and behave is not separate from something called sexism, a term that’s part of the discourse.
Another would be a familial discourse–the stories we tell each other and about each other, the way we behave and the way we perpetuate behaviors with our children.
I think most people experience discourses in terms of a society’s explicit and implicit rules or “facts of life.” It’s when you question them, that things get sticky
Here are a few of the myths and discourses I think postmodernism “demystifies.”
We’re individuals with our own minds. We’re free agents. We act on life; we create our lives. As an aside, I think these are characteristic of an individualistic society and its discourses.
SL is ALL about questioning, making up a society, doing life. It’s got its discourses, and it shakes first life discourses up. What about the fact that I change my gender with a few clicks or be talking to an Avatar with an identity(s), who is also a first life person with identities?
